In some situations it makes sense to use logarithmic
fixed-point. This number format can be regarded as a floating-point
format consisting of an exponent and no explicit significand.
However, the exponent is not interpreted as an integer as it is in
floating point. Instead, it has a fractional part which is a true
mantissa. (The integer part is then the ``characteristic'' of
the logarithm.) In other words, a logarithmic fixed-point number is a
binary encoding of the log-base-2 of the signal-sample magnitude. The
sign bit is of course separate.

An example 16-bit logarithmic fixed-point number format suitable for
digital audio consists of one sign bit, a 5-bit characteristic, and a
10-bit mantissa:

S CCCCC MMMMMMMMMM

The 5-bit characteristic gives a dynamic range of about 6 dB
= 192 dB. This is an excellent dynamic range for digital audio. (While
120 dB would seem to be enough for audio, consider that when digitally
modeling a brass musical instrument, say, the internal air pressure near
the ``virtual mouthpiece'' can be far higher than what actually reaches the
ears in the audience.)

A nice property of logarithmic fixed-point numbers is that multiplies
simply become additions and divisions become subtractions. The hard
elementary operation are now addition and subtraction, and these are
normally done using table lookups to keep them simple.

One ``catch'' when working with logarithmic fixed-point numbers is that you
can't let ``dc'' build up. A wandering dc component will cause the
quantization to be coarse even for low-level ``ac'' signals. It's a good idea
to make sure dc is always filtered out in logarithmic fixed-point.